Project Pink dead? Well, I never liked it in any case.

MobileCrunch reports on a hot tip from a supposed anonymous Microsoft employee which spilled the beans on the rumoured Project pink.

According to him, Project Pink appears to be a hive of chaos and incompetence:

Much of the Danger/Sidekick team has left or been fired since the 2008 acquisition. According to our source, there is â€œno braintrust that understands how to build a productâ€ left on the Pink team.

If a product does ship, it will lack the third party application support/store that rumors have indicated it would have â€“ the remaining team members simply donâ€™t know how to get it done.

Amongst remaining employees, dissent is high. Much of the team uses iPhones around the office, or their old Sidekick handsets. Employees â€œhate the productâ€ internally, many feeling that the division exists only to â€œchallenge [the Windows Mobile 7 team] and upset them into competing.â€ Our source outright indicated that they felt the product was never intended to ship.

At this point, the project is roughly 2 years behind schedule. In order to continue moving forward toward some undefined launch date, basics such as a calendar application have already ended up on the cutting room floor.

On the â€œTurtleâ€ (the smaller of the two devices): The touchscreen is unusable, as there are too many elements on screen at one time. â€œYour finger covers 50% of the screenâ€, says the source. The unit was designed â€œon the flyâ€, with a design drawn up and then sent to Sharp for verbatim manufacturing. Our source says this backwards design process has lead to a â€œnear disastrousâ€ battery life. â€œDesigners forced Sharp to build to sketch and not â€˜worry about that stuff.â€™â€

The UI concept work was originally done by an outside party, and Microsoft engineers have been â€œstruggling to replicate it ever sinceâ€.

In short, according to the tipster, Project Pink â€œis near death and probably will be cancelled.â€

Now of course, looking at those awful renderings we saw, we are not going to lose any tears over a Microsoft dumb phone. At least the tip indicated Windows Mobile 7 is separate from this monstrosity. However if Project Pink is such a disaster, one can only wonder if Roz Ho, its head, will be cancelled with the project.